The Internet has become an indispensible part of life for a large part of world's population. The Internet provides a bottomless source of information as well as a medium for communication through social networking, chats, instant messaging and e-mail. The internet is also used for shopping, paying bills, playing games, watching videos, and other activities. Some types of information available on the Internet is oriented towards the adult population. In other words, that information is not for the children and teenagers. This information can be pornographic material, which can be usually found on dating sites, adult video sites and elsewhere. Of course, this kind of resources should not be available to children.
With every year, children and teenagers visit the Internet more often, as they are eager to get to know and to use all that it has to offer. The Internet allows children to learn, to develop and to network socially. Yet, young Internet users often do not have adequate understanding of all the information available on the Internet, since this information is often not verified or lacks desired quality. Some data may even be dangerous and harmful to the children. Therefore, there is a need to control children's access to information in cyberspace.
This need is currently addressed using parental control systems. The main tasks of these systems are the protection of children from the threats associated with children's work with computers and access to the Internet, as well as control over time that children are allowed to spend on the Internet, playing computer games, or watching videos. Parental control systems generally allow parents to formulate flexible restriction rules that control children's access to Internet and software running on their computers. In addition, parental control systems can create reports of actions performed by the computer users. These report are shown to the user-administrator (who could be a parent, for example), so that the user can stay informed of the actions performed by children and, if necessary, edit the restriction rules.
However, modern parental control systems may inadequately respond to anomalous user action. Anomalous actions are those that should be prohibited to the user, but not blocked by restriction rules for one or more of the following reasons: the administrator forgot to create a rule covering the anomalous action; the administrator was not thorough in formulating restriction rules and missed the anomalous action; or the administrator was not aware of the possibility of blocking the prohibited application or content. Parental control systems are configured to block user actions specifically described by the restriction rules that were formulated before a user performs any anomalous actions. The performed anomalous actions will be reported to the parent/administrator post factum. And only after reviewing the report, the administrator can edit restriction rules to cover prohibited anomalous actions. Thus, if the user finds a way to circumvent restriction rules, then the time for the system to block user actions can be great, since it depends on the reaction of the administrator.
There are other defects of the current parental control systems. For example, they require the administrator to be competent and able to understand reports generated by the system, so he/she can make changes to the restriction rules or create new rules. Also, they do not consider information from external data source. When there is a complete automation of different teaching methods, the external data may come from a school, for example, or from another institution of learning. An example of the external data could be the information that was received as a report or as a grade from a teacher. This kind of information could serve as a basis for access regulation that gives to the child user either more or less leeway.
Therefore, there is a need for parental control system with adaptive regulation of user's access to the computer and Internet resources based on user's behavior.